A project of a Ukrainian media NGO, founded in 2014 by Ukrainian university professors and students, is working to refute Russia’s propaganda and fake news about the ongoing war in Ukraine. Part academic research, part journalistic mission, StopFake’s aim is simple: truth.
As fake news stories go, the one at the end of January was so outrageous that Olena Churanova, a fact-checker for the Kyiv-based StopFake project couldn’t help but laugh. The story, carried on the so-called Z-channels of Telegram, Russia’s most popular social media platform, said that Ukraine had been reduced to paying its soldiers in ‘vouchers’ instead of the nation’s currency, the hryvnia.
Following the Soviet propaganda playbook, agitprop apparatchiks, who take their orders from the Kremlin, spun the story from a nub of truth.
Starting on 1 February, Ukraine changed the way its soldiers and other security forces pay is calculated. Far from paying its security forces in what would amount to chits, Ukraine standardised the pay rates and put in place a sliding scale for hazardous duty pay that takes account of the place, conditions and characteristics of where the individual is.
The quality of the picture of the ‘voucher’ on Telegram “was not even up to the level of a 15-year-old using Photoshop”, says Churanova, who has worked at StopFake since 2016.
As she showed in her article published on StopFake on 3 February, a simple Google image search revealed that the ‘voucher’ dates back to 2014 and shows a certificate testifying to the purchase of military bonds. To make it look like a ‘voucher’, the photoshopped version contains the words: “Certificate that is issued as payment for service in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
Yet, the forger skipped one of the most important steps in producing fake documents: verifying that the signature on the fake is valid. The signature is of Ukrainian finance minister, Oleksandr Shlapak, but he left the office at the end of 2014. Ukraine’s present minister of finance is Serhiy Marchenko.
“This one was really easy to debunk,” Churanova told University World News. “But debunking works better in the West than it does in Russia. The fakes are important because its [the Z-channels’] audience, Russians, want to believe in what they see. They are not going to check the information. They just see it on Telegram or other Russian social networks and they believe it.”
Last December, StopFake debunked a fake that said that the Ukrainian army did not have the men to fight the Russian army (in occupied areas of the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine) and were using teenage girls as snipers. “It’s ridiculous when you see it,” says Churanova. “You wouldn’t think that it is possible for somebody to believe in that bullshit.”
StopFake employees 25 people, including eight fact-checkers, most with journalism backgrounds.
They are adept at using programs like Yandex (reverse image search), FindClone.ru (which allows a reverse image or facial recognition search) and SunCalc (which allows an approximation of time of day based on shadows) and following the twists and turns of the narratives put out by the Kremlin on such platforms as Telegram.
Although Google Search and a few other programs allowed researchers to compare images and spot fakes, in the early days StopFake relied heavily on volunteers from around Ukraine.
Recently, a poll showed that StopFake was known and trusted by 16% of Ukrainians.
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